Films byTexts by Assia Djebar
Article EN
31.03.2021
A Woman, a Film, a Different Gaze
Josie Fanon 1977
Translated by

    What does it mean to make a film when you are a woman, an Algerian, a novelist (writing in French) and you decide to make it in your own country, for the people of that country, with the widest distribution possible, as it is a film for television?

    Article EN
    31.03.2021
    Forbidden Gaze, Severed Sound

    Élie Faure tells us that the aging Renoir, when he used to refer to this light in Women of Algiers, could not prevent large tears from streaming down his cheeks. Should we be weeping like the aged Renoir, but then for reasons other than artistic ones? Evoke, one and a half centuries later, these Bayas, Zoras, Mounis, and Khadoudjas. Since then, these women, whom Delacroix – perhaps in spite of himself – knew how to observe as no one had done before him, have not stopped telling us something that is unbearably painful and still very much with us today.

    Article EN
    31.03.2021
    Extract from Une éducation algérienne

    A slow pace, silence, memory regained, sensuality, Assia’s film tried to lead us far away from our noisy and dogmatic present. It tried to make us seize the intimacy of secluded women in unusual ways. The language of shadows, the language of bodies. The film is set somewhere between Cherchell and Tipaza. The beauty of the locations takes the story to a realm of mythological enchantment while leaving intact the realism of the existential wound that is buried beneath the silence of the characters. 

    DOSSIER EN
    31.03.2021
    Out of the Shadows

    Assia Djebar, Jocelyne Saab, Heiny Srour, Selma Baccar, Atteyat Al-Abnoudy

    Although there has been a notable rise of Arab female film directors in recent decades, the work of many pioneers tends to remain painfully neglected. The Out of the Shadows film programme, originally conceived for the Courtisane festival 2020 in Ghent, was intended to address this obscurity and revitalize the work of a diversity of filmmakers whose films remain overlooked and barely screened. Five of these filmmakers are presented in this Dossier: Atteyat Al-Abnoudy, Selma Baccar, Assia Djebar, Jocelyne Saab and Heiny Srour. In the words of Assia Djebar: “All of us, all of us who come from the world of women in the shadows, are reversing the process: at last it is we who are looking, we who are making a beginning. ”

    Article EN
    31.03.2021
    “I was looking for a musical language”

    Two interviews with Assia Djebar

    “I started from the idea that the more a woman is traditional, the less she needs an association with folklore in terms of sound. When you come across the image of a person whose clothes and attitude are very “conservative”, there’s no need to associate this person with flutes or tambours. At the end, during the party in the caves, the women dance while singing the most ordinary songs, popular street songs really, and I linked this to the fourth dance of Bartók’s “Dance Suite”. I thought it emphasized the inherent nobility of these women. I got the impression that it was original music, written especially for this moment!”

    Article EN
    31.03.2021
    A Woman’s Gaze
    Assia Djebar 1989
    Translated by

      Can it be simply by chance that most films created by women give as much importance to sound, to music, to the timbre of voices recorded or captured unawares, as they do to the image itself? It is as though the screen had to be approached cautiously and be peopled, if need be, with images seen through a look, even a short-sighted, hazy look, but borne on a full, commanding voice, hard as stone but fragile and rich as the human heart.

      Article EN
      31.03.2021
      The Singing of Oblivion
      Assia Djebar 1982
      Translated by

        To give a rhythm to the images of reality for twenty years of everyday life in the Maghreb, where each of the three countries has paid its death toll to obtain its independence. This work, which should be a simple “historical” visualization, I approach as a mined area. I apprehend it as an explosive that awakens from my past, from any past, the engulfed pains we believe to be rotten or defeated, I don’t know. They come alive again, they dress again as faceless ghosts, but veiled, as if they suddenly demanded the unfolding of a purifying liturgy.

        DOSSIER
        31.03.2021
        Out of the Shadows: Assia Djebar

        Assia Djebar (1936-2015) was the first Algerian woman to attend the École normale supérieure de jeunes filles outside Paris. Between the ages of twenty and thirty, she wrote four novels. But in the mid-1960s, she decided to abandon writing in French, the language of Algeria’s colonizer. Cinema offered her new ways to approach language as well as the world of the women in her home region. To film The Nouba of the Women of Mount Chenoua in 1975-77, Djebar went back to the mountain of Chenoua in order to listen and give voice to the oral histories as transmitted by otherwise silenced women. In 1980, she resumed her career as a writer with Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, a collection of stories expressing Algeria’s collective memory through polyphonic narratives by female voices. For her final film, The Zerda or the Songs of Oblivion (1978-1982), she spent two years sifting through archival footage shot by French colonizers in the first half of the twentieth century, weaving it into an alternative vision of the history of the Maghreb. As Djebar grew to be one of the most important figures in North African literature, she continued to raise the issue of women’s language and the circulation of women’s voices, all the while developing what she has termed her “own kind of feminism.”

        Article EN
        31.03.2021
        The Zerda or the Maghreb in the 1930s

        Assia Djebar’s treatment for La Zerda et les chants de l’oubli [The Zerda or the Songs of Oblivion] (1978-1982): “Without any comment, however, shortly before and during the credits, three known paintings by Delacroix unfold in long shots and in slow pan shots that focus on details of characters, horses or costume elements, each of the paintings linked to an atmosphere of music and fantasia from the pre-colonial Maghreb.”

        Article EN
        31.03.2021
        A First Look

        So your film is more a film about space than about women?

        Yes, because saying that my film is a film about women doesn’t mean anything. I’ll always make these films... Female bodies, women are my subject. Like a sculptor somehow, who uses a certain material, while another sculptor will use another material. That should mean something, shouldn’t it? I think that’s what the Cinémathèque audience couldn’t stand; I’ve removed men from my film. But what can I say, except that I’ve just shown what exists in reality. I intentionally separated the sexes in the image, as in reality. The intention is feminist, and why not? I wanted to show the number one problem of Algerian women, which is the right to space. Because I was able to verify that the more space the women had, the firmer they stood.

        note EN
        26.02.2021
        Out of the Shadows

        On the occasion of the Out of the Shadows programme (originally conceived for the Courtisane festival 2020), Courtisane, Sabzian and KASK School of Arts compiled, edited and published the publication Out of the Shadows, focussing on the work of five Arab female film directors: Atteyat Al-Abnoudy, Selma Baccar, Assia Djebar, Jocelyne Saab and Heiny Srour. A copy of Out of the Shadows can now be ordered!

        Article FR EN
        1.04.2020
        My Need for Cinema
        Assia Djebar 1994
        Translated by

          For me, cinema is neither a “job” – in the sense of a career – nor a “vocation” – in the sense of a calling. What is it, then, for me, having made my first film shortly after the age of forty, then a second one shortly after the age of forty-five?

          Article FR EN
          1.04.2020
          Mon besoin de cinéma

          Ce soir aurait été la soirée d’ouverture de la 19ème édition du Festival Courtisane à Gand. En raison de la rapide propagation du virus COVID, les organisateurs du festival ont été contraints d’annuler entièrement l’évènement, y compris la première partie du programme Out of the Shadows. À l’occasion de ce programme, Courtisane, Sabzian et le KASK School of Arts ont uni leurs efforts pour rédiger une publication d’accompagnement, axée sur le travail de cinq femmes cinéastes arabes : Atteyat Al-Abnoudy, Selma Baccar, Assia Djebar, Jocelyne Saab et Heiny Srour. La sortie effective de la publication n’étant pas claire pour le moment, Sabzian en publie un premier texte, de la cinéaste et écrivain algérienne Assia Djebar (1936-2015). Assia Djebar : « Le cinéma pour moi n’est ni un « métier » – au sens d’une carrière –, ni une « vocation » – au sens d'un appel. Quoi donc, pour moi qui ai réalisé un premier long-métrage peu après l’âge de quarante ans, puis un second, peu après quarante-cinq ans. »